Just me typing from a void into this box and out to the world for you. A not very bold experiment in old school democracy. Free press. Free peas. Equal helpings of panache and bloodlust. Seeking followers and detractors. No purchase necessary.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

"Indie Rock" and me

Fair enough. I wonder, though, if
“Indie Rock” ever existed. In the Reagan and Bush Sr. years,
teenagers like me, in my small town had a few musical options: Top
40, Metal (mostly of the Hair variety), “Classic Rock,” which
didn't yet really mean anything, and “New” Country (as opposed to
Country & Western in the Williams, Cash, Nelson tradition).

This was the standard bill of fare.
Hip-hop, had not, in any form really infiltrated middle America, let
alone our out-of-the-way outpost in the foothills of a mountain range,
squarely in the middle of a National Forest, separated from
civilization by 50 miles of windy, narrow, often icy highway. It may
as well have been 50 light years.

There were teens and young adults, like
me, however, who did seek out alternatives. Pre-internet, I couldn't
simply see what Pitchfork or Stereogum was up to, or download entire
albums for “free.” I couldn't chat with my friends online and pick
their brains and hard drives for the next big sonic thrill. Kids like
me, we read magazines, paying special attention to tiny ads in the
back, promoting bands with names like Dinosaur, Black Flag, Bad
Brains, Skinny Puppy, Minor Threat, Minutemen. We'd send SASEs and a
few weeks later, receive a crudely mastered cassette of
crude-sounding music that meant the world to a kid stuck between
Michael Jackson and Garth Brooks.

So there was punk, post-punk, hardcore,
thrash metal, punk-funk, lo-fi garage music, and much, if not all,
was released on small independent labels. We didn't call it Indie
Rock, though. When I was a sophomore in high school, rocking my
Descendents, my fIREHOSE, my Suicidal Tendencies, (along with the
more mainstream-but-still “cool” Cure, R.E.M., The Smiths, etc.),
we were just a few years from the emergence of something called
“Alternative” music. I should be clear here—“Alternative”
existed, in my time, not as a category or genre or marketing niche,
but rather a plain descriptor. If a kid said she liked “alternative”
music, she meant that what she listened to was mostly stuff you
couldn't find on the radio, unless you managed to know a really cool
college station and listened between the hours of 2 and 4 am. And most
of us, we just said what we liked—metal, punk, etc.

By 1993 or so, I was 21 years old, the
media was telling us that “punk had broke.” The music of stoners,
burn-outs, and the generally anti-social youth was now on every Top
40 playlist, pushed forward largely by the unlikely success of
Nirvana and the media-created “Grunge” scene, repackaged once
again as “Alternative.” What did an alternative band sound like?
Got me. It was no longer tied to independent labels, no longer
confined to certain modes of production, certain ethics or a DIY
aesthetic. Alternative was some dollar signs, a fake fashion trend,
a Seattle-centric fetishization of the “normal kids” behind the
corporate glitz, which of course had now been gussied up with a ton
of corporate glitz. I began to drift.

By my early 20s I had largely forgotten what was
cool or what was new and had turned my gaze backward, discovering the
rock and roll of the 60s and 70s, most of which I had managed to
neglect during my teen years. And then I grew up a little. Music
ceased to be central to my way of being. I had other things to do--go to college, drink too much, unsuccessfully ply co-eds. These activities required no new soundtrack. The old stuff worked (or didn't work) just fine.

When I woke up from this hibernation in
the early 2000s, things had changed. No longer was it necessary to
hang out in dark record stores, subscribe to cheap, badly written
magazines, or physically seek out, on foot, as it were, new music.
Now, it was available in a few clicks. I began, tentatively at
first, to see what I had missed.

A few things I learned: Metallica now
sucked and were assholes, to boot; there was this thing people called
“alt-country” that I was really digging on; a lot of bands had
seemed to emerge that re-embraced the old school punk DIY aesthetic:
people were starting bands, starting labels, releasing their own
records, gathering fans through Myspace and other social media
outlets. Pitchfork and their ilk provided a guide to this new
landscape, and as a reborn music fan, I was grateful.

Then I started meeting the fans. The
scene kids. The hipsters. You know the drill, the stereotypes, so I
won't expound. I started to question the music and what these kids
meant when they professed a love for “indie rock.” Sure, a lot
of these bands sounded similar, but many more did not. Some of them
started on indie labels and had moved on to things like making money.
This “new” musical landscape, it seemed, was similar to what had
existed 20 years earlier—the internet, among other things, had just
made it more visible, more widely accessible. And the hip kids had
decided that it was “Indie Rock” that they loved. It was like
“Alternative” of the early 90s, but that fad had a very short
lifespan. Now, in 2012, I still hear people in their 20s and 30s
waxing ecstatic about this or that “Indie” band. I find myself
having no idea what that means as a description; it says more about
the fan than the music most of the time.